The Story of the Earth and Man

by Sir John William Dawson

Being granted thus much, the evolutionist next proceeds to demand that we shall also believe in the indefinite variability of material things, and shall set aside all idea that there is any difference in kind between the different substances which we know. They must all be mutually convertible, or at least derivable from some primitive material. It is true that this is contrary to experience. The chemist holds that matter is of different kinds, that one element cannot be converted into another; and he would probably smile if told that, even in the lapse of enormous periods of time, limestone could be evolved out of silica. He may think that this is very different from the idea that a snail can be evolved from an oyster, or a bird from a reptile. But the zoologist will inform him that species of animals are only variable within certain limits, and are not transmutable, in so far as experience and experiment are concerned. They have their allotropic forms, but cannot be changed into one another.

But if we grant this second demand, the evolutionist has a third in store for us. We must also admit that by some inevitable necessity the changes of things must in the main take place in one direction, from the more simple to the more complex, from the lower to the higher. At first sight this seems not only to follow from the previous assumptions, but to accord with observation. Do not all living things rise from a simpler to a more complex state? has not the history of the earth displayed a gradually increasing elevation and complexity? But, on the other hand, the complex organism becoming mature, resolves itself again into the simple germ, and finally is dissolved into its constituent elements. The complex returns into the simple, and what we see is not an evolution, but a revolution. In like manner, in geological time, the tendency seems to be ever to disintegration and decay. This we see everywhere, and find that elevation occurs only by the introduction of new species in a way which is not obvious, and which may rather imply the intervention of a cause from without; so that here also we are required to admit as a general principle what is contrary to experience.

If, however, we grant the evolutionist these postulates, we must next allow him to take the facts of botany and zoology out of their ordinary connection, and thread them like a string of beads, as Herbert Spencer has done in his “Biology,” on the threefold cord thus fashioned. This done, we next find, as might have been expected, certain gaps or breaks which require to be cunningly filled with artificial material, in order to give an appearance of continuity to the whole.

The first of these gaps which we notice is that between dead and living matter. It is easy to fill this with such a term as protoplasm, which includes matter both dead and living, and so to ignore this distinction; but practically we do not yet know as a possible thing the elevation of matter, without the agency of a previous living organism, from that plane in which it is subject merely to physical force, and is unorganised, to that where it becomes organised, and lives. Under that strange hypothesis of the origin of life from meteors, with which Sir William Thomson closed his address at a late meeting of the British Association, there was concealed a cutting sarcasm which the evolutionists felt. It reminded them that the men who evolve all things from physical forces do not yet know how these forces can produce the phenomena of life even in its humblest forms. It is true that the scientific world has been again and again startled by the announcement of the production of some of the lowest forms of life, either from dead organic matter, or from merely mineral substances; but in every case heretofore the effort has proved as vain as the analogies attempted to be set up between the formation of crystals and that of organized tissues are fallacious.

A second gap is that which separates vegetable and animal life. These are necessarily the converse of each other, the one deoxidizes and accumulates, the other oxidizes and expends. Only in reproduction or decay does the plant simulate the action of the animal, and the animal never in its simplest forms assumes the functions of the plant. Those obscure cases in the humbler spheres of animal and vegetable life which have been supposed to show a union of the two kingdoms, disappear on investigation. This gap can, I believe, be filled up only by an appeal to our ignorance. There may be, or may have been, some simple creature unknown to us, on the extreme verge of the plant kingdom, that was capable of passing the limit and becoming an animal. But no proof of this exists. It is true that the primitive germs of many kinds of humble plants and animal s are so much alike, that much confusion has arisen in tracing their development. It is also true that some of these creatures can subsist under very dissimilar conditions, and in very diverse states, and that under the specious name of Biology,[BA] we sometimes find a mass of these confusions, inaccurate observations and varietal differences made to do duty for scientific facts. But all this does not invalidate the grand primary distinction between the animal and the plant, which should be thoroughly taught and illustrated to all young naturalists, as one of the best antidotes to the fallacies of the evolutionist school.

[BA] It is doubtful whether men who deny the existence of vital force have a right to call their science “Biology,” any more than atheists have to call their doctrine “Theology;” and it is certain that the assumption of a science of Biology as distinct from Phytology and Zoology, or including both, is of the nature of a “pious fraud” on the part of the more enlightened evolutionists. The objections stated in the text, to what have been called Archebiosis and Heterogenesis seem perfectly applicable, in so far as I can judge from a friendly review by Wallace, to the mass of heterogeneous material accumulated by Dr. Bastian in his recent volumes. The conclusions of this writer, would also, if established, involve evolution in a fatal embarras des richesses, by the hourly production during all geological time, of millions of new forms all capable of indefinite development.

A third is that between any species of animal or plant and any other species. It was this gap, and this only, which Darwin undertook to fill up by his great work on the origin of species, but, notwithstanding the immense amount of material thus expended, it yawns as wide as ever, since it must be admitted that no case has been ascertained in which an individual of one species has transgressed the limits between it and other species. However extensive the varieties produced by artificial breeding, the essential characters of the species remain, and even its minor characters may be reproduced, while the barriers established in nature between species by the laws of their reproduction, seem to be absolute.

With regard to species, however, it must be observed that naturalists are not agreed as to what constitutes a species. Many so-called species are probably races, or varieties, and one benefit of these inquiries has been to direct attention to the proper discrimination of species from varieties among animals and plants. The loose discrimination of species, and the tendency to multiply names, have done much to promote evolutionist views; but the researches of the evolutionists themselves have shown that we must abandon transmutation of true species as a thing of the present; and if we imagine it to have occurred, must refer it to the past.

Another gap is that between the nature of the animal and the self-conscious, reasoning, moral nature of man. We not only have no proof that any animal can, by any force in itself, or by any merely physical influences from without, rise to such a condition; but the thing is in the highest degree improbable. It is easy to affirm, with the grosser materialists, that thought is a secretion of brain, as bile is of the liver; but a moment’s thought shows that no real analogy obtains between the cases. We may vaguely suppose, with Darwin, that the continual exercise of such powers as animals possess, may have developed those of man. But our experience of animals shows that their intelligence differs essentially from that of man, being a closed circle ever returning into itself, while that of man is progressive, inventive, and accumulative, and can no more be correlated with that of the animal than the vital phenomena of the animal with those of the plant. Nor can the gap between the higher religious and moral sentiments of man, and the instinctive affections of the brutes, be filled up with that miserable ape imagined by Lubbock, which, crossed in love, or pining with cold and hunger, conceived, for the first time in its poor addled pate, “the dread of evil to come,” and so became the father of theology. This conception, which Darwin gravely adopts, would be most ludicrous, but for the frightful picture which it gives of the aspect in which religion appears to the mind of the evolutionist.

The reader will now readily perceive that the simplicity and completeness of the evolutionist theory entirely disappear when we consider the unproved assumptions on which it is based, and its failure to connect with each other some of the most important facts in nature: that, in short, it is not in any true sense a philosophy, but merely an arbitrary arrangement of facts in accordance with a number of unproved hypotheses. Such philosophies, “falsely so called,” have existed ever since man began to reason on nature, and this last of them is one of the weakest and most pernicious of the whole. Let the reader take up either of Darwin’s great books, or Spencer’s “Biology,” and merely ask himself as he reads each paragraph, “What is assumed here and what is proved?” and he will find the whole fabric melt away like a vision. He will find, however, one difference between these writers. Darwin always states facts carefully and accurately, and when he comes to a difficulty tries to meet it fairly. Spencer often exaggerates or extenuates with reference to his facts, and uses the arts of the dialectician where argument fails.